Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare consultant and analyst with 20 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies. Contact her at @ziegerhealth on Twitter or visit her site at Zieger Healthcare.

Here where I live in the Washington, DC metro, federal IT is a major presence. Government IT consulting firms cluster along the area’s highways, and their executives own countless sprawling manses in the nearby suburbs. Those players include Leidos, a northern Virginia-based contracting firm with clients in IT, biomedical research and public health.

Though the firm has annual revenues of about $5.1 billion, and 18,000 employees, Leidos generates little fanfare here, despite a pedigree that includes a $5 billion partnership with Lockheed Martin’s Information Systems & Global Solutions segment that provides IT and intelligence services. However, Leidos is actually the new identity of long-established power player SAIC, which restructured and changed its name in late 2013 and has deep roots in national security and government IT contracting.

Most readers probably care little about government IT unless they service that industry. But I’d argue that we should all know about Leidos Health which, among other distinctions, was part of the team (Cerner, Leidos and Accenture Federal) that won the $4.3 billion plus contract to implement an EMR for the US Department of Defense last summer.

The DoD contract was hotly contested, by teams that included an Epic, IBM and Impact Advisors combination, but the Cerner-fronted team pulled off a win that may have saved the EMR vendor’s brand in a brutally competitive market. While it’s not clear what role Leidos played in the win, a DoD official was quoted as saying that a Cerner deal was projected to be “much cheaper,” and it’s possible Leidos support pricing played some role in its calculations. Perhaps more tellingly, DoD officials said cybersecurity considerations played a major role in the award, which plays to Leidos’ strengths.

Leidos Health hasn’t had unmitigated success. Most recently, it was part of a team scheduled to assist with a little-mentioned Epic EMR rollout for the US Coast Guard, which was cancelled due to “various irregularities.” The Coast Guard, which pulled the plug on the rollout in April, had been planning its EMR implementation since 2010.

However, this probably wasn’t much of a setback. And Leidos still delivers health IT services to several other federal agencies, including HHS and the Department of Veterans Affairs, including cybersecurity, health analytics, IT infrastructure and support and software development. And it works with the gamut of enterprise EMR vendors, including Allscripts, Cerner, Epic, McKesson and Meditech.

Truth be told, Leidos may not deserve the “quiet company” label given to it by Healthcare Informatics magazine, which recently dubbed it one the most interesting vendors of 2016. I’m sure Beltway execs who compete for federal contracts are well aware of Leidos Health, which had annual revenues of $593 million last year. And government IT decision-makers are well acquainted with parent company SAIC, a pillar of federal contracting which has been in the business since 1969. (In fact, SAIC president of technology and engineering Deborah Lee James was sworn in as Secretary of the Air Force in late 2013.)

That being said, the DoD deal has dramatically raised Leidos Health’s visibility in the broader health IT world. It will be interesting to see what it does going forward, don’t you think?